Most retailers refuse to release specific sales figures for consumer electronics purchases during the Thanksgiving weekend, loath to annoy suppliers or give competitors insights.
The uncertainty of the business means that studios often imitate one another, in order both to gain from competitors' insights and to insulate themselves from criticism.
Interestingly, I've heard from other professionals who've told me they would never share with their competitors insights about how they conduct their business or build more success.
According to the Apple CEO during a Wall Street Journal conference, Watch sales were "up sequentially" and "ahead of our expectations," but wouldn't reveal exact unit sales because the company didn't want to offer competitors "insights" from the figures.
But instead of choosing to join just one company, he decided to productize his knowledge in the form of an online dashboard which provides businesses with market insight and intelligence, competitor insight, ASO (app store optimization) assistance, and more.
This comes just three months after one of Descartes' largest competitors, Orbital Insight, closed its own $50 million Series C with Sequoia.
With App Usage Intelligence, App Annie's customers will be able to analyze their own apps as well as that of competitors, gaining insight into detailed metrics that demonstrate how popular an app is outside of downloads – a metric that can be misleading as companies run marketing and ad campaigns to acquire users or even buy downloads in order to move up higher in the rankings.
Agricultural companies defend their stonewalling by saying that unrestricted research could make them vulnerable to lawsuits if an experiment somehow leads to harm, or that it could give competitors unfair insight into their products.
Or, without any "journalistic" intervention, this (by one of Narrative Science's competitors, Automated Insights) for the newswire AP: "Apple Inc (AAPL) on Tuesday reported fiscal first-quarter net income of $18.02bn.
CrowdAI's most direct competitor, Orbital Insight, has raised more than $28 million, but focuses exclusively on satellite imagery.
